3 Direct Mail Marketing Takeaways from Iterable’s Benchmark Report

Marketers know creating a unified customer experience, online and off, pays. We see it time and time again—cross-channel marketing campaigns deliver the strongest returns.

But how many marketers are really utilizing cross-channel tactics to the full effect? And what are the best practices when it comes to cross-channel marketing? Where are the opportunities?

Leading growth marketing platform Iterable answered questions like these in its recently released benchmark report. The white paper provides fascinating insights on how real marketers employ cross-channel marketing techniques across the customer lifecycle, and we highly recommend our customers, and all marketers for that matter, take a look.

Iterable is uniquely positioned to analyze cross-channel marketing, as the platform has sent hundreds of thousands of campaigns across email, direct mail, mobile push, web push, in-app and SMS over the last several years. Its benchmark report dives deeper into some of these campaigns, studying how today’s marketers use various channels to successfully activate, nurture and reactivate customers.

Here at Inkit, we’re most interested in the report’s findings on direct mail, of which there are many.

Here are a few direct mail takeaways that surprised us:

1. Dynamic content is still a huge opportunity.

Personalized content works in all channels. Modern consumers want to receive relevant messaging. This much marketers know—and have known from some time. However, Iterable found that only 64 percent of survey respondents are using dynamic content to personalize marketing promotions. Those who fail to do so cite things like a lack of technical resources, time or customer data.

Source: Iterable 2018 Benchmark Report

This stat surprised us because, when you have the right tools, dynamic content insertion should be neither time nor resource intensive. For example, Inkit’s postcard builder now has an easy-to-use dynamic content insertion feature. And when you sync Inkit and Iterable, you can even pull in any variable data housed within Iterable to personalize your direct mail. Iterable’s report has a wealth of additional information on how to add dynamic content to your cross-channel marketing strategy.

2. Way too few marketers do cart abandonment right (if at all—yikes!).

OK, so we already knew this. But it continues to shock us nonetheless. Seriously, so many marketers leave money on the table by failing to address shopping cart abandonment. This is a huge opportunity, but according to Iterable just 51% of marketers surveyed have any type of abandoned cart sequence—let alone a campaign with the one-two punch of email+direct mail. (About 22% of marketers surveyed are using direct mail for cart abandonment, however. Whew). The report states that abandoned cart sequences are likely to generate more ROI than any other email campaign. So, if you’re one of those marketers who doesn’t have any sort of cart abandonment campaign yet, you’ll definitely want to download the report now for recommendations on conversion recovery.

Source: Iterable 2018 Benchmark Report

3. Marketers are experimenting more with direct mail, but email is still king.

For many marketers, “cross-channel” seems to mean a mix of online channels. Iterable found that most brands prioritize email, with web, mobile and finally direct mail used by far fewer brands. We were disappointed to learn only 10% of marketers use direct mail in their welcome campaigns, since onboarding is where the personal touch and tactile experience of direct mail can truly shine. However, about 20% of marketers send direct mail for promotions, even favoring the channel over mobile push and text messaging. And direct mail is second only to email when it comes to cart abandonment (but, as mentioned above, both are vastly underused). Perhaps most concerning, only 8% of marketers send direct mail for re-engagement, with the vast majority of marketers (94%) sending email. This means many brands still aren’t knocking on the mailbox once locked out of the inbox. Here at Inkit, we find that re-engagement is one of the strongest—if not the strongest—use cases for direct mail, with some of our customers receiving double-digit response rates on win-back postcards.